You need to get calories from somewhere, should it be from carbohydrate or fat?

Monday, January 28, 2008

Hunger

I'm about half way through Marina Lwycka's multiple prize wining novel "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian". It's quite funny in places, although the stereotypes are laid on with a trowel. The narrator is Nadia (Nadezhda), a first generation English woman with Ukrainian parents. After her mother's funeral she describes the state of the house. It's full of food. The understairs pantry, the freezers, the drawers under the beds. All full of food. This is fiction.

Lwycka herself was born to Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Germany, at the end of the second World War. Her parents may well have had the same history as my father. I'll bet they were the source of the snippets of history involving food.

The only book my father owned was Victor Kravchenko's "I Chose Freedom". This is factual autobiography. You can pick up a copy for under £3.00 second hand through Amazon. Kravchenko was a young and enthusiastic Soviet official at the time when Stalin discovered that famine could be used to solve what was then known as the "Agrarian Problem". If you starved the peasant populace to death in their millions, the survivors would accept the collectivisation of agriculture. The policy required between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians dead of starvation in just over one year, but it worked. Kravchenko was there and was aghast at the suffering he witnessed in the Western Ukraine. His account makes harrowing reading. My father, a peasant from the Western Ukraine, would have been about 10 years old when the famine was engineered. He never, ever alluded to any of this beyond owning Kravchenko's book. And mentioning, just once, that Kravchenko painted an accurate picture.

As a youngster it never struck me as odd that we had a large part of our garden down to vegetables (mind you, as a youngster I didn't think my father had an accent!). Or a big greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers. Or multiple fruit trees. Or TWO local council allotments. Each with a greenhouse packed with tomatoes. Big potato patches, spuds in clamps for the winter. We never much ate New Potatoes. Bulk main crop was preferred. Masses of bulk yield soft fruit. Peas. Peas were harvested late, because Dad had no interest in petit pois when two weeks later you could have a crop of serious bulk food. Apples in drawers and boxes in the basement, wrapped in newspaper. Bottled fruit. Freezers full of runner beans. Pickled cabbage.

No one else's family did this, as far as I can remember, but Lwycka's character of the mother in her novel could have been based on my father.

Anyway, there is a fascinating passage in "Tractors". It's a disastrous argumentative tea party and one of the interchanges goes like this. Nadia, the narrator, is skinny. The elderly Ukrainians (the Zadchucks) are not. They're arguing about weight.

It's fiction, but these characters are based on people who were there in the Ukraine in 1932. Humans don't get fat to get metabolic syndrome. Those of us (me included) who are a bit smug with a BMI around 20 maybe ought to remember that a BMI of 25-30 appears to give best longevity in Western culture, even without a famine. I don't rate my own chances living off my fat during any period of famine and I only own one greenhouse and a small freezer...

I keep coming back to the idea that LC may accidentally treat a deficiency of Food. Food with a capital F being defined as nutrient dense. Oh, and it's a four letter word!

I think cattle must make their own DHA and EPA. Grass has predominantly alpha linolenic acid as it's lipid. The only analysis I have of PUFAs in grass doesn't specify any PUFAs with longer than 18 carbon chains, but that may reflect the analysis technique rather than their presence. But possibly VLC PUFA are only made by algae, rather than all plants.

The rumen bacteria appear to convert added DHA and EPA to something else, there is a lot of info in the results sections of this paper, particularly the control rumenal contents, which appear to contain zero pre existing DHA or EPA. So it looks like lots of alpha linolenic and some linoleic acid go in to the rumen of grass fed cattle, some of each (more linoleic than alpha linolenic) make it out, the rest is used by bacteria to make those interesting trans fats with health benefits.

So I'm thinking that the very long chain PUFA in beef come from the cattle elongase/desaturase system rather than the rumen bacteria.

Peter

Re cats, yes. The cat food manufacturers know exactly what cats need, MICE. You just have to look at the commerical cat food company specialist ranges; B/D for senile dementia, J/D for joints, M/D for metabolic syndrome, N/D for neoplasia management. These companies know EXACTLY what is missing from their premium mainline brands. How else could they make foods, which work, to correct the deficiencies?

Peter, I've been thinking about how it's a scam to have all these types of cat food and dog food. Probably, the best you could do other than to feed pets raw meat, would be to use the Kitten/Puppy formula - which is probably the most nutrient dense. I have argued with people saying "why do you think the companies have all these special formulas?" I bet that the "weight loss" and "senior" pet foods are low-fat and high-carb, so it's no surprise the animals eating those foods tend to get fatter and fatter along with their owners who are eating the same way. But nobody ever bothers to think about things like this logically. Instead, it's blamed on sloth and gluttony, as if food had no effect on hormones and metabolic processes.

I never got in to animal nutrition as Tom Lonsdale has sorted it all out for carnivores and most herbivores should eat grain free grass. People pole up at the vets looking for a pill, not a lecture on wolf nutrition for their toy poodle! Obviously my cats are essentially rawfed.

Peter

PS Too right re senior and most weight loss diets. Even the m/d LC diet is soy protein based. Retch.

It's observational only, but there are LOTS of studies observing this. On the SAD all cause mortality is lowest at BMI around 26. I've only blogged about it once, the best set of studies I've seen is on Dr Briffa's site. He collects them!

I searched his site using "BMI mortality" and generated this page

http://www.drbriffa.com/?s=BMI+mortality

If the link doesn't work (not sure how permanent search links are!) you can just go to his site and do the same search...

If so, this raises the question about what healthy boundaries are in terms of body fat (non "ectopic") in relation to lean body mass.

My body seems to defend a body fat percentage that is around 10% no matter what I eat within the context of a paleo diet, whereas some people even on a strict low carb approach stabilize at much higher levels, and might even re-gain lost weight significantly after the disturbances of the metabolic syndrom have been rectified.

As far as I can remember without going through the posts and specific refs it is the fat which is protective, fairly specifically in the elderly on the SAD or its derivatives. These are quite possibly sarcopaenic pot bellied senior citizens....

On paleo or LC all bets are off as there is no observational database to work from....

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!